Restore backups on my XPS 8500 with SSD, problems

I didn't want to hi-jack skyglider's thread so I started a new one.

I'm having trouble getting a restore to work on my XPS 8500.  I worked with a Dell helpdesk person yesterday to trouble shoot a hardware issue.  The hardware issue is the memory on the Video card fails the diagnostic testing.  The machine intermittently will lose video signal and go to a black screen for about 5 seconds and then come back on.  The short story is the helpdesk guy tried uninstalling the video driver and reinstall them.  The results ended up with the PC losing video output after logging into the PC.  So he gave up and scheduled a tech to come replace the video card.  I was left with a non functioning windows.

OK, no problem as I had plenty of backups.  Wrong!   I got out my Macrium Reflect rescue disk, Windows PE, and rebooted the PC on the CD.  I need to create a new rescue CD because this one has no USB or network support. Everything looks good and it finds my backups and I start the restore.  The PC hardware has an SSD MSata 256mb boot drive and a 2TB spinner.  I start to notice that the progress is very very slow.  Five hours later it was still only 20% completed.  So I realize that it appears to be a compatibility issue between Windows PE and the SSD system.  I terminated the restore and now I really have a non booting PC.  Ok I boot the windows repair CD and it can't restore the image saying there isn't enough room on the C: drive to do the restore.  Next I booted into the Dell Datasafe system and tried doing a system restore from the DVD's I created after the initial setup.  It also says there isn't enough room on the target drive.  I reboot and try the same process using the recovery partition on the hard drive.  Same message, not enough room on target drive to do the restore.

At this point I have way too much time invested in this incident.  I just grab my Win 8 DVD and do a scratch load of Win 8.  Now I am reloading software but I'm confident I have a stable OS load.  Now to figure out how am I going to backup this SSD going forward.  I'm confident that the Macrium Reflect is a good system.  I had done a test restore of some files but hadn't had the opportunity to try a bare metal restore using the Win PE boot disk.  Really disappointed in my experience with this issue.

--
Kevin